I think there's a time and place for genetic algorithms: heuristics to solve genuinely hard problems. This problem has a known, polynomial-time algorithm. If the headline was "An easy primer to genetic algorithms" then I'd agree with you. But it's "self-parking car in 500 lines" -- not impressive.

Can someone who is downvoting this care to enlighten a lay person like myself who just wants to know what this is all about?

To be fair to the downvoters, on the surface I appear to be whining about a headline. But what I'm actually doing is complaining about a common thread I see in the industry, where people use ML as a crutch to avoid thinking, and are frequently proud of "solutions" that don't even work despite their absurd computational expense. And for some reason, people in ML command ridiculously inflated salaries.

I'm all about using the right tool for the job. In this case, I'd say algebra, if the job is "park the car." If the job is "teach genetic algorithms with a simple example," no complaints except for the headline.

But if the point is to each genetic algorithms with a simple example -- is there a better simple example problem where a genetic algorithm is a more appropriate approach? And if there's not a simple example where a genetic algorithm approach is clearly a good tactic, or if it's not straight-forward to learn to distinguish when a GA approach makes sense, is teaching GAs useful?

The point is to develop general strategies for solving a wide range of problems, not to solve any one individual problem.

Sure. I'm downvoting because I think the original article is an interesting and useful exposition of genetic algorithms. I don't think it intends to be the software that would run inside a self-parking car.

I downvoted because I thought that the comment's dismissive tone is not helpful, and doesn't encourage the sort of content I like to see on Hacker News. I like it when enthusiastic people make cool stuff that explains an idea well. I don't like it when commenters are incredulous that others aren't doing something the same way they would, or generally are cruel and condescending about someone else's enthusiasm. "Not impressive" is just such an unhelpful thing to say, and not what I come here for, so I downvoted.

This comment in particular seems to be a great example of "middlebrow dismissal" in the original sense from pg.

To those reading this who are not spenczar5, up front I'd like to apologize as it is somewhat off topic, but also somewhat relevant as this commenter is the one who inspired my reply originally.

> I downvoted because I thought that the comment's dismissive tone is not helpful

I can't help but notice though that you initially had a rather dismissive comment, which I tried to reply to so I could ask for clarity, but you had deleted it by the time I hit submit. My comment that you are responding to was initially for you.

Can you shed more light on how this dichotomy exists? Generally, if you don't care for those types of comments, you'd also not make them, which even now in your second content is somewhat derisive with the "middlebrow dismissal" even if it is a quote from pg.

I've rapidly deleted comments, myself. Usually because they're snarky or otherwise counterproductive. I saw that comment too, but wouldn't have responded. Better to downvote and move on... among other things, that allows folks to delete comments that don't stand a second read.

Yeah, I was irritated enough that I first made a petty comment which I immediately regretted. I don't remember the phrasing but it was something like "Sheesh, where's your article then?"

Anyway, I deleted it because I can't really defend that tone myself, and think that a downvote says enough.

I don't really understand the rest of your comment. What dichotomy are you talking about?